Konstantin Chernenko

Konstantin Chernenko (24 September 1911-10 March 1985) was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 13 February 1984 to 10 March 1985, succeeding Yuri Andropov and preceding Mikhail Gorbachev.

Biography
Konstantin Chernenko was born in Novoselovo, Yeniseysk Governorate, Russian Empire on 24 September 1911, and he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1930 before serving in the Cheka border guards from 1930 to 1933. Chernenko became a party official working on organization and propaganda both in his native Krasnoyarsk area and elsewhere, and he became head of the propaganda department of the Communist Party of Moldova Central Committee in 1958, meeting and befriending the local party leader Leonid Brezhnev. Despite his mediocrity, his subsequent rapid rise was commensurate with that of Brezhnev, until he joined the CPSU Central Committee in 1971 and the Politburo in 1978. Brezhnev clearly groomed his trusted lieutenant to succeed him, though in 1982 the party leadership went to the much more gifted Yuri Andropov instead. When Andropov died, Chernenko was chosen mainly in order to stall the inevitable rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. Given Gorbachev's power and influence, there was little that Chernenko could do, probably to the satisfaction of his conservative colleagues in the Politburo. His death marked the final end of the Brezhnev era, and removed all obstacles to Gorbachev's final rise to power.